25% of files downloaded from The Pirate Bay are fakes

For years, antipiracy companies like MediaDefender (read our 2007 profile) have scratched out a living by flooding peer-to-peer file-sharing networks with bad data. While the techniques differ, the goal is the same: to make online piracy just enough of a hassle that legal alternatives look good by comparison.

This attempt at poisoning the P2P well started a quiet war between the file-swappers and the antipiracy groups, each escalating the arms race by rolling out new weapons and new countermeasures. File-swappers began blocking known IP ranges that served fake files, and sites like The Pirate Bay worked to remove bad links to fake content and to ban the user accounts of those who uploaded the listing information.

And yet, despite years of this sort of sniping, P2P networks remain flooded with fake files. New research suggests that nearly a third of the files at big BitTorrent trackers are bogus.

A group of European academics, most of them from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, presented a paper (PDF) at an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) conference last month in Philadelphia that tries to quantify the motives of the biggest BitTorrent seeders. Most seeders turn out to have less-than-altruistic motives, instead using their uploads to advertise faster private trackers or advertising-funded websites. But one major group of seeders had a different economic incentive: making money from record labels and movie companies for disrupting P2P networks.

A huge dataset from popular BitTorrent search engines The Pirate Bay and Mininova showed that antipiracy agencies managed to upload an amazing 30 percent of all files in the study group (which comprised 55,000 top files shared by 35 million IP addresses). And these files weren't simply ignored by users; even taking the countermeasures deployed by search sites and their users into account, fake files made up 25 percent of actual user downloads.

Poisoning the well

The paper concludes that "major BitTorrent portals are suffering from a systematic poisoning index attack that affects 30 percent of the published content.

As for the effectiveness of countermeasures: "The portals fight this phenomenon by removing the fake content as well as the user accounts used to publish them. However, contrary to what has been reported in previous studies, this technique does not seem to be sufficiently effective since millions of users initiate the download of fake content."

Not all of these fake publishers are antipiracy groups; some are just criminals. The two dominant categories of content from the "fake publishers" are movies and software—in fact, the "fake publishers" upload more software than any other group. The study's authors conclude that most of the video content from fake publishers comes from antipiracy groups, but that the software is more likely to be from malicious users out to spread a computer virus or promote a botnet.

Compared to legitimate files, the fake files are unpopular—for obvious reasons—and so are not redistributed by many users. That means the fake publishers need to stay connected for long periods of time to fully seed their files. Researchers found, in fact, that they spend the most time connected "due to their obligation to continuously seed their content to keep it alive." And most of these fake connections come from only three Web hosts: tzulo, FDC Servers and 4RWEB.

Still, this "unpopularity" is relative. The antipirates have managed to make one out of every four downloads from The Pirate Bay an unsatisfying experience—which must be quite satisfying indeed to those paid to cause this sort of confusion.

Only true if you consider wasting people's and ISP's bandwidth a success... otherwise they've accomplished nothing. People will just go find another torrent and download it again.

But some of the fakes are infected with viruses. So, they are trying to make pirating a dangerous endeavor to reduce its appeal.

Though I don't support most of these anti-piracy groups, I actually don't have a problem with this particular approach. I would much rather they try to increase the value of their product (by lowering the value of the free version) than sue people for millions.

Only true if you consider wasting people's and ISP's bandwidth a success... otherwise they've accomplished nothing. People will just go find another torrent and download it again.

Every digital media packrat I know uses private trackers. The only ones who use the big public ones are likely to be the less geeky.

And it has worked pretty well. I know a lot of people who don't use illegal torrents specifially due to either having gotten a virus from one before or from knowing someone who has.

Of course, now those of you with access to one of the really good, secure private trackers will have some cachet. You can go by a cool nickname like "Red" and people at the office can be referred to you and they get to say things like "I understand you're a man who knows how to get things."

Only true if you consider wasting people's and ISP's bandwidth a success... otherwise they've accomplished nothing. People will just go find another torrent and download it again.

Transfer caps say otherwise. The 250GB cap Comcast has is relatively large when you consider there are people in the US and elsewhere that have monthly caps as low as 4GB or less per month. That makes D/L a 700MB or 1.4GB fake a costly mistake. Only those with huge caps or no caps don't care.

Honestly, people using sites like TPB are probably dead end users in the first place. If you're going to pirate via torrent, you need a VPN and a good private site. Better yet, just buy what you want.

Only true if you consider wasting people's and ISP's bandwidth a success... otherwise they've accomplished nothing. People will just go find another torrent and download it again.

Every digital media packrat I know uses private trackers. The only ones who use the big public ones are likely to be the less geeky.

And it has worked pretty well. I know a lot of people who don't use illegal torrents specifially due to either having gotten a virus from one before or from knowing someone who has.

So its driving everyone to private trackers? Sounds about correct. I still don't see how this helps the IP rights holders stop piracy, maybe it helps drive it further underground, but it doesn't help stop it.

I also wouldn't count on people swearing off downloadable content because of viruses, its been like that since day 1 and will never change. It also didn't hold back the P2P era at all.

I'll believe its working when piracy per capita is down, for now it just seems like a good way to waste bandwidth and pretend to be solving a problem while people either ignore it or go elsewhere for content. I wonder how much they get paid to do this too...

Granted I only ever download random old TV shows and stuff like that but I've never gotten a fake anything. The few torrent sites I use have comment/rating systems where things get flagged if they are fake and I don't really worry about viruses because I never download anything executable from bittorrent. If viruses are an issue, wouldn't that be limited to things that you run like a setup program for a bogus game or program download? Unless I am mistaken, I can't pick up malware by opening up a video in VLC or whatever.

Only true if you consider wasting people's and ISP's bandwidth a success... otherwise they've accomplished nothing. People will just go find another torrent and download it again.

Transfer caps say otherwise. The 250GB cap Comcast has is relatively large when you consider there are people in the US and elsewhere that have monthly caps as low as 4GB or less per month. That makes D/L a 700MB or 1.4GB fake a costly mistake.

I guess thats what I'm used to, no caps but limited bandwidth. I still say it doesn't really stop people in the long run. As mentioned in another post, people will just use a verified source next time and download it again. It will, at best, drive the piracy underground a bit more or trigger some changes in how content is verified before download. I doubt it will lead to less piracy.

"sites like The Pirate Bay worked to remove bad links to fake content and to ban the user accounts of those who uploaded the listing information. "If only they made the same effort to remove torrent files for illegal content..

Only true if you consider wasting people's and ISP's bandwidth a success... otherwise they've accomplished nothing. People will just go find another torrent and download it again.

Every digital media packrat I know uses private trackers. The only ones who use the big public ones are likely to be the less geeky.

And it has worked pretty well. I know a lot of people who don't use illegal torrents specifially due to either having gotten a virus from one before or from knowing someone who has.

So its driving everyone to private trackers? Sounds about correct. I still don't see how this helps the IP rights holders stop piracy, maybe it helps drive it further underground, but it doesn't help stop it.

I also wouldn't count on people swearing off downloadable content because of viruses, its been like that since day 1 and will never change. It also didn't hold back the P2P era at all.

I'll believe its working when piracy per capita is down, for now it just seems like a good way to waste bandwidth and pretend to be solving a problem while people either ignore it or go elsewhere for content. I wonder how much they get paid to do this too...

You're never going to be able to eliminate it entirely. But by cutting off access to the less geeky, you're taking the low hanging fruit. You know the saying about how locks only keep out honest thieves? Well, those honest thieves are worth a lot of money if even a small proportion of them opts for buying legitimate copies in lieu of piracy.

"Most seeders turn out to have less-than-altruistic motives, instead using their uploads to advertise faster private trackers or advertising-funded websites."

Hmmm, this study sounds fairly unbiased and def had sound research. I'm sure they came to this conclusion because some people like to copy torrents that orig private and attatch public trackers. Top notch skills there.

A little bit of common sense makes this number much less imposing. While granted there are a lot of fakes out there; most of it is ignored by people using torrents. While P2P users learn that certain things should be avoided, trackers leave it out there because in most cases only registered users can remove or flag content. Who wants to register if they are downloading unfairly? It may even be somewhat for show so that the content providers don't fix the tells. These tells include distributing RAR and ZIP files, which most people know are pointless when using torrents, making files that are too small or too large for the content they are supposed to be, and using unsafe formats that have the ability to embed executable content instead of MPG or AVI. Often you can even look at the trackers and seeds which will be way too high, or way to low, like zero.

Granted I only ever download random old TV shows and stuff like that but I've never gotten a fake anything. The few torrent sites I use have comment/rating systems where things get flagged if they are fake and I don't really worry about viruses because I never download anything executable from bittorrent. If viruses are an issue, wouldn't that be limited to things that you run like a setup program for a bogus game or program download? Unless I am mistaken, I can't pick up malware by opening up a video in VLC or whatever.

Yes, not normally--but some content asks you to download a strange codec--and then the fun begins. There are plenty of users out there willing to fall for that. Also, note that a lot a bt'd content is warez--games and other software.

You're never going to be able to eliminate it entirely. But by cutting off access to the less geeky, you're taking the low hanging fruit. You know the saying about how locks only keep out honest thieves? Well, those honest thieves are worth a lot of money if even a small proportion of them opts for buying legitimate copies in lieu of piracy.

Yeah. I agree with your general sentiment. I just disagree that this will keep much of anyone from downloading for various reasons ranging from the "download it again" to "download from a verified source" to "the end users are so dumb they don't know where viruses come from anyway" to "fuck viruses I want to watch lost".

In my experience, this will do little to discourage them. It reminds me of behavioral psychology where you get into reward behaviors. When you make a reward intermittent (successful download only some % of the time) it doesn't do anything to reduce people's willingness to try for it unless you make it so bad you pretty much never can get anything. You'd have to have a massive percentage be garbage before people would give up on that source, and even then they'd be likely just to find a better source if they hadn't already. So I stand by my original assertion that its still largely a waste of time and bandwidth.

Only true if you consider wasting people's and ISP's bandwidth a success... otherwise they've accomplished nothing. People will just go find another torrent and download it again.

Every digital media packrat I know uses private trackers. The only ones who use the big public ones are likely to be the less geeky.

And it has worked pretty well. I know a lot of people who don't use illegal torrents specifially due to either having gotten a virus from one before or from knowing someone who has.

So its driving everyone to private trackers? Sounds about correct. I still don't see how this helps the IP rights holders stop piracy, maybe it helps drive it further underground, but it doesn't help stop it.

I also wouldn't count on people swearing off downloadable content because of viruses, its been like that since day 1 and will never change. It also didn't hold back the P2P era at all.

I'll believe its working when piracy per capita is down, for now it just seems like a good way to waste bandwidth and pretend to be solving a problem while people either ignore it or go elsewhere for content. I wonder how much they get paid to do this too...

You're never going to be able to eliminate it entirely. But by cutting off access to the less geeky, you're taking the low hanging fruit. You know the saying about how locks only keep out honest thieves? Well, those honest thieves are worth a lot of money if even a small proportion of them opts for buying legitimate copies in lieu of piracy.

Thing is, most dead end users know at least one geek willing to set them up with a safety net (VPN service free or otherwise) for P2P, or a USENET account with someone like Astraweb (about $8/mo), or a private tracker, or can get the stuff to them. And this will only continue to grow as more and more kids grow up with a computer in the home and the desire to use all of that potential.

Legislation doesn't work either. After the last round of legislation in France piracy went up, not down.

Well, those honest thieves are worth a lot of money if even a small proportion of them opts for buying legitimate copies in lieu of piracy.

They won't, usually the choice is get it illegally or not at all - not illegally or buy it. that is the same logic mistake the companies make. A good free product does not translate to a good pay product. A good example of this are sites like Hulu or Netflix. TV shows are commercial supported but other wise shown free, but after a period of time they try and charge $10 a month to see this free content with ads too. Something I could have recorded on my DVR...Few people will pay for something that was distributed freely to them to begin with. Even honest thieves will take it or leave it on principle. But it isn't just TV, anything priced above it's worth will become black market or go un-purchased. History supports this.

It reminds me of behavioral psychology where you get into reward behaviors.

Speaking of that, how many pirates take that route because of the continual bitch slapping they receive from the DRM schemes and lack of value in current content offerings? There's more to the argument about piracy than competing with free. It's, for many, that the free offerings are not only more convenient, but offer more than the retail product. If companies would offer up options that add value to the purchase while removing idiotic management schemes that hamper the experience, they might see sales rise. Try offering stuff like high quality fold-out liners in CD's. Do more with digital access on BluRay discs. Pack in cloth maps, trinkets, and extras in games (I remember when color manuals, maps, and collectibles just came with the vanilla game and not a $90+ collectors edition).

Granted I only ever download random old TV shows and stuff like that but I've never gotten a fake anything. The few torrent sites I use have comment/rating systems where things get flagged if they are fake and I don't really worry about viruses because I never download anything executable from bittorrent. If viruses are an issue, wouldn't that be limited to things that you run like a setup program for a bogus game or program download? Unless I am mistaken, I can't pick up malware by opening up a video in VLC or whatever.

Yes, not normally--but some content asks you to download a strange codec--and then the fun begins. There are plenty of users out there willing to fall for that. Also, note that a lot a bt'd content is warez--games and other software.

Kinda what I figured. I guess I shouldn't take for granted that lots of folks do know about BT but don't know anything about codecs or executables. I guess there isn't much new here though. It seems that the vast majority of virus/malware issues I run across on friends' computers is a result of believing in something too good to be true and letting themselves get tricked into running something.

I don't think this will have much effect though. When I was younger and had practically no disposable income I downloaded music and movies from p2p. I couldn't afford things so I did what I did since I was a kid copying tapes from friends - I pirated. The thing that stopped me was never fear of getting busted or of viruses or annoyance at fake files. It was the fact that my income went up and I could afford to buy stuff. Not only that but there were easier ways to get content for free or very cheap that I did not have access to in the past. Legal streaming media pretty much stopped my casual media piracy in its tracks. The only time I bother now is when it's something not available through legit means.

No real point here except my own anecdotes. Pretty much everyone I know has a similar story. Our illegal copying had more to do with lack of funds or access. It wasn's so much an issue of lost sales as it was lost opportunity to make money from us in other ways such as free ad-supported content to keep us happy until we could afford the luxury of buying lots of movies and music.

The real point of this is that it significantly lowers the percentage of files which are copyright infringing (if they are only declaring a work infringing by title, without actually reviewing the file). If you remove the poisoned 30% of files, then theres only what, 50-60% of files which are copyright infringing.

Really, it is a brilliant double attack. It prevent people from getting the infringed content easily and it makes the piracy rate look worse to sell their stronger copyright spiel.

Well, those honest thieves are worth a lot of money if even a small proportion of them opts for buying legitimate copies in lieu of piracy.

They won't, usually the choice is get it illegally or not at all - not illegally or buy it. that is the same logic mistake the companies make. A good free product does not translate to a good pay product. A good example of this are sites like Hulu or Netflix. TV shows are commercial supported but other wise shown free, but after a period of time they try and charge $10 a month to see this free content with ads too. Something I could have recorded on my DVR...Few people will pay for something that was distributed freely to them to begin with. Even honest thieves will take it or leave it on principle. But it isn't just TV, anything priced above it's worth will become black market or go un-purchased. History supports this.

I don't really agree. I actually buy most of my music digitally now in part because the illegal route is just enough of a pain in the ass. Even if you have a legit tracker people like using files in unusual formats or crappy bitrates. I pretty much only illegally download music now to explore/discover new artists that I haven't heard before. If I know I want something, I buy it. This is partly a function of me having an income now, which I didn't when I was a student, but also just a fact of legal options being very passable ([sort of] lossless codecs, easy search, predictable pricing and quality, no DRM) these days.

Basically you're thinking of the subset of people who are like you and who know people who are like you. There is a whole galaxy of consumers out there, though, and your description applies only to a small proportion of those.

Of course, now those of you with access to one of the really good, secure private trackers will have some cachet. You can go by a cool nickname like "Red" and people at the office can be referred to you and they get to say things like "I understand you're a man who knows how to get things."

Talking about me? Yes, people at the office say things like that to me, seeing as I'm the IT manager where I work. (actually the only IT guy). Never used private trackers though. Got a fair few films in the old days via Pirate Bay and others but now less and less.

Mainly cos services like LoveFilm (Netflix) and BBC iPlayer give me what I want when I want at a fair price. Also for software, Steam sales and iOS App stores (and the new Mac App store) are finally allowing me to pay reasonable prices for legal software, i.e. a few quid each, not some rip off £20 for a dubious game or app or video.

I am curious about the types of files...I am guessing higher end software (OSes, Photoshop, CAD, the like) and possibly games. Even the most dumb internet downloader these days is somewhat savvy, and knows the difference between an .exe and an .avi (hopefully). If not, they are not an internet downloader for very long (someone mentioned low hanging fruit; this is exactly what this is). Anyone who pays attention (seems to be 75% of the interwebs do) can avoid viruses and the like. I am also curious how many of these viruses/whatever are actually executed. Subjectively, I know of people that just run bots all day to grab everything they can and sort it out later. These people are also "digital hoarders" as they grab music, games, movies, programs by the dozens per day but never actually use/listen/watch any of it. Never. (Seriously, my old room mate would openly boast to having "thousands" of movies, but ask him what he thought of any one of them he would reply, "I haven't seen it yet"). The issue is not as simple as many would have us believe.

What the legality of spreading viruses and botnets as a means of controlling content. I mean unless the antipiracy groups only upload useless files then intentionally damaging someones computer should be illegal. It's sorta like the ends justify the means argument. We can let law enforcement get the job done better and more effectively by loosening up some restricting laws but that's not how society works.

You're never going to be able to eliminate it entirely. But by cutting off access to the less geeky, you're taking the low hanging fruit. You know the saying about how locks only keep out honest thieves? Well, those honest thieves are worth a lot of money if even a small proportion of them opts for buying legitimate copies in lieu of piracy.

Yeah. I agree with your general sentiment. I just disagree that this will keep much of anyone from downloading for various reasons ranging from the "download it again" to "download from a verified source" to "the end users are so dumb they don't know where viruses come from anyway" to "fuck viruses I want to watch lost".

In my experience, this will do little to discourage them. It reminds me of behavioral psychology where you get into reward behaviors. When you make a reward intermittent (successful download only some % of the time) it doesn't do anything to reduce people's willingness to try for it unless you make it so bad you pretty much never can get anything. You'd have to have a massive percentage be garbage before people would give up on that source, and even then they'd be likely just to find a better source if they hadn't already. So I stand by my original assertion that its still largely a waste of time and bandwidth.

It doesn't discourage the determined, hardcore users, it discourages the casual users. The casual users are the ones that, overall, drive the mass of current-media piracy in movies and music. The folks who will even bother going to private trackers are not going to stop in any event, short of being sued/arrested (depending on your country).

But if you make casually pirating media difficult beyond a certain point (which depends on the legal alternatives available), it becomes more reliable and convenient to get something legally vs illegally. iTunes is the current prime example of this behavioral change. Do people still pirate music? Absolutely. However, there are hardware-bundled, super convenient ways for non-technical users to get music for (what is widely considered to be) a reasonable price. Place that against the relatively more complex task of finding the exact torrent/P2P program/blog listing for an album to download, and, increasingly, the legal alternative wins.

Add that to more and more plentiful legal streaming options and things like the Limewire cessation, and you can see how this will go. Sure, there will always be the folks who are bound and determined to get something for free, no matter the hassle, but those folks are, increasingly, a small minority of total pirate activity.

Well, those honest thieves are worth a lot of money if even a small proportion of them opts for buying legitimate copies in lieu of piracy.

They won't, usually the choice is get it illegally or not at all - not illegally or buy it. that is the same logic mistake the companies make. A good free product does not translate to a good pay product. A good example of this are sites like Hulu or Netflix. TV shows are commercial supported but other wise shown free, but after a period of time they try and charge $10 a month to see this free content with ads too. Something I could have recorded on my DVR...Few people will pay for something that was distributed freely to them to begin with. Even honest thieves will take it or leave it on principle. But it isn't just TV, anything priced above it's worth will become black market or go un-purchased. History supports this.

No the choice isn't necessarily illegally or not at all. I know people who do music and video work professional, who are VERY well paid who pirate all of the software that they use. Why paid for it, if you don't need to?

Similarly with games, I know people who haven't soft-modded their XBOX 360 for one reason: they like Xbox Live and do not want to be banned (there was an influx of banned Xbox 360s on ebay after Microsoft started banning soft-modders). So they are forced to purchase games.

The fact is most people don't want to pay for something if they know that they can get it free. Even if you make a make download file, as long as the person knows they can get a non-fake elsewhere, they'll keep looking (it's doesn't take much effort).